AI drives NYSE-listed Snowflake’s revenue growth, productivity as cloud data demand surges

[SINGAPORE] Artificial intelligence is emerging as both a growth engine and a productivity driver for US cloud data company Snowflake, as enterprises step up adoption and governments in Asia push ahead with AI strategies.

CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy believes that this increasing AI focus is not just driving sales, but also changing how clients interact with the platform.

“I would say that an equally, if not actually bigger, impact is going to come from using AI to make Snowflake easier to set up and use,” he told The Business Times.

Ramaswamy added that its new product coding agent Cortex Code has shortened the time it takes for customers to derive value, with AI agents now deployable in a fraction of the time previously required.

Within Snowflake, AI has also shrunk the time needed to deploy new projects, he noted. In the past, new products were born out of product requirement documents, with designers coming up with designs, reviewing them and then implementing them.

“All of my designers now are expected to write code and write working prototypes on top of real code bases, so we have substantially changed how we write and deploy software,” said Ramaswamy.

This shift in workflow due to AI is also trickling down to Snowflake’s customers, with AI agent coding tools made to be more iterative, so customers can quickly set up an agent and refine it. In the past, it might have taken three months to get a working version of a Snowflake AI agent.

New ways of working

The switch to get its own employees to use AI was not a smooth process, with a lot of iteration and figuring out how to do things, he noted.

Still, he views it as “exciting times” for the business, especially when teams share their productivity improvements – where a task that might take weeks is now done in hours or less.

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This bodes well for the New York Stock Exchange-listed company, which reported revenue of US$4.7 billion in FY2026 ended Jan 31, up from US$3.6 billion in FY2025.

Losses were broadly flat year on year at US$1.3 billion in FY2026. But product revenue, a key metric that Snowflake tracks, is on the rise. Product revenue measures revenue based on platform consumption excluding professional services and other revenue. It grew 27 per cent to US$4.5 billion in FY2026.

Meanwhile, its net revenue retention rate, which is a measure of how much customer spending is increasing, has been “very stable” at 125 per cent, added Ramaswamy.

Making use of AI is something Snowflake’s customers in Asia have pushed ahead with, as Ramaswamy noted how they have been driven to make changes and use tech as an enabler.

Singapore in particular has been a key market due to the government’s work with AI, from the National AI Strategy to the National AI Council.

“There’s just so much emphasis on how the government is actually putting skin in the game right now, and that’s going to cut across all industries,” said Jenny Koh, Snowflake’s Singapore country manager.

Governments in emerging markets in South-east Asia are also looking to transform their data with AI. This can be seen as an opportunity for Snowflake.

“We respect the desires that nations like Singapore or India have to ensure that both the data and the systems that are needed to act on data are under their control, and so we will work with them to make sure that we create mutually beneficial situations,” said Ramaswamy.

Looking ahead

Snowflake will continue to focus on innovating its core data platform as AI continues to accelerate the use of data. Conversations with customers end up looking at how to unlock business value from their data, and AI will help deliver that, Ramaswamy noted.

The recent geopolitical shocks have had minimal impact on the business, he said. Graphics processing units and chip shortages have also not affected Snowflake’s business expansion much, as the company relies on hyperscalers to provide the computing capacity.

Instead, skills might be the biggest challenge to growing the business in Asia.

The company is looking into training, working with schools and institutions to train students, as well as its partners in the ecosystem.

In Singapore, Snowflake has signed a memorandum of understanding with Nanyang Polytechnic and Temasek Polytechnic to use Snowflake’s Academy curriculum to train students.

“As much as we talk about the platform, we have to enable them to ... unlock what’s possible,” said Koh.